尼布尔警句录

关于人生

The mastery of nature is vainly believed tobe an adequate substitute for self mastery.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feedsupon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime;therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;therefore we are saved by love.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes completesense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment ofincongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anythingelse.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannotchange, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know thedifference.

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have nomoral God.

关于罪

Original sin is that thing about man whichmakes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable ofachieving it.

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than inits intentions.

 

关于社会

I think there ought to be a club in whichpreachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism ofthe one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them prettyclose to the truth.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man'sinclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan valueand ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

 

注：尼布尔(ReinholdNiebuhr, 1892 – 1971)，美国神学家。2008年美国总统候选人Barack Obama 称他为“我最喜欢的哲学家之一”。